We need to talk about China

Published 02-20-2020

Spent a fun weekend in Nashville with the husband and kid in tow, to meetup with my dad who was in town for a conference. Snarking about politics and catching up on news from home was in order in between dad’s meetings... unfortunately, Tennessee’s wild spring weather had a different plan, and dad spent much of the weekend in bed with a bad cold. On Sunday before we left I joked with him about flying into San Francisco and not to touch anything at the airport so he wouldn’t catch any stray corona viruses lying around.

But repercussions from this new pandemic virus are nothing to laugh about, and they highlight some real problems that our country is going to have to face.

Beyond the real loss of human life, there are questions about how China is handling the crisis and the flow of information regarding the virus. China is circumspect in the best of times, now the world is watching and questioning much of what is actually being reported.

Not to mention the disinformation in the early days about the origins of this new virus.

First and foremost China is closed for business right now. Over half of China’s population lives in cities with restrictions on entering and leaving, meaning complete lockdown. Ten percent of China, 150 million people, have restrictions on when they can leave their house. Add to this, the Corona virus is centered in the industrial and manufacturing districts, with factories and commerce in that part of the world effectively shut down.

If you think this won’t affect the rest of the world, you would be completely wrong.

Businesses in the U.S. and Europe that depend on overseas components from Chinese partners are already reporting shortages on components with back orders not being filled “for the foreseeable future.”

Logistics are a necessary part of reality in industry. Just in time manufacturing and global trade agreements sent supply chains chasing higher profits, with our manufacturing capabilities farmed out to countries where employees work for pennies on the dollar and beyond the reach of OSHA regulations.

Jaguar-Land Rover was the first large corporation to announce it will run out of Chinese made component parts for it’s UK production facilities. Large corporations can usually weather these kind of logistical storms. Small businesses who depend on Chinese manufacturing are not so flush with credit and cash on hand.

Now, we are faced with a country that does most of our manufacturing, including heavy portions of medical supplies and equipment, pharmaceutical drug compounds (97% of our antibiotics are made in China) and electronics being completely shut down for months on end.

Some people might wonder who thought it was a good idea to allow manufacturing in critical industries to leave our borders in the first place, but that horse is already out of the barn and three counties away.

Sending our manufacturing to a socialist nation known for secrecy and ongoing human rights atrocities - in the current era - was especially brilliant in hindsight. Not that I expect many of our leaders to outright say it.

It was only a matter of time for the COVID-19 to reach our shores, with economic factors taking precedence over security, and even best guesses by leading researchers think that it will be at least until April that the virus runs it’s course on China’s mainland. The virus is now in 18 countries, and quarantine sites have been set up stateside in 15 locations by the U.S. military near major airports.

While I’m not going to do any kind of chicken little routine regarding the virus - or start wearing a mask whenever I am in public, I am very concerned about out dependency on China generally. I am very, very concerned that our dependence on cheap doodads and ever larger televisions is funding our own downfall as a nation.

While I’m at it, I think Senator Tom Cotton is more on the nose about the beginnings of this virus than anyone else in our government. Efforts trying to paint him as a conspiracy monger have been a nice touch, though. I’d wager more Americans see credence in his theories of a lab created virus rather than a cross species jump at a Chinese market.

The latest diplomatic kerfluffle over Huawei and our 5G networks, and the 5G networks of our allies is just another example of why it’s a bad idea to hand over the keys to broadcast the internet and all cellular communications to the nation that accounts for 85% of all intellectual property theft. Instead many nations have bent over backwards to allow China into industries critical to their national security.

More and more of our nation’s corporations, culture and government is willing to bend to the demands of China’s Communist Party. A government that regularly disappears people and commits wholesale genocide on it’s own citizens. A country that continually monitors it’s own people in every facet of their lives, even controlling how many children they “are allowed” to have. Hollywood is now a subsidiary of China’s strategic investment, complete with investors demanding censor over topics it finds troublesome... like a Taiwan patch on Tom Cruise’s jacket in the opening scenes of the Top Gun remake.

Juxtaposed to the brutality and repression of the Chinese government are our national presidential candidates extolling socialism for the United States. Michael Bloomberg even went so far as to say that President Xi was absolutely not a communist dictator, but a politician with a constituency to serve and be responsive to.

Tell that to the Chinese people drug from their homes screaming in response to the COVID-19 quarantines. There’s also a few ethnic and religious groups in China that would have a word or two for the former mayor, if they weren’t currently being held in labor camps.

We are witnessing the beginning of what I hope is another realignment of national priorities from unmitigated profit to concerned welfare for our citizens and our nation’s interests. There is a reason President Trump has touted moving manufacturing back within our borders, and not just because it sounds good in an election year. There are real world implications for these broad policy directives, with multitudes of repercussions.

And that’s before we even venture to policy propositions like Medicare for All, free college or nationalizing elections. Maybe instead of trading away our value as a nation to up our trade numbers we should study a little more on the Glorious Revolution and the ultimate goals of China’s 100 year plan for communist dominance across the world.

There’s ultimately more on the line than just our gross domestic product.